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Reports find China still largest source of hacking and cyber attacks

Despite protestations from its government, China is still the main source of hacking attempts and cyber attacks, according to two new reports.

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Akamai's State of the Internet report, which comes out every quarter, states that China is the source of 41 percent of all of the cyber attacks in the world in the fourth quarter of 2012 -- that's more than the rest of the top ten combined. Verizon's 2013 Data Breach Investigations Report report is also out, which found that 30 percent of the confirmed hacking attempts it tracked originated in China.

It's worth pointing out that Akamai's report lists the United States as the second-largest originator of cyber attacks, at ten percent, but it's also worth noting that China's share of worldwide attacks has increased massively since the third quarter of 2013.

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Back then, only 31 percent of cyber attacks were attributable to Chinese sources.

The number of DDoS attacks seen worldwide throughout 2012 was three times as high as in 2011, the report also details. After China and the US, the rest of the top ten countries where attacks originated were Turkey, Russia, Taiwan, Brazil, Romania, India, Italy and Hungary.

The report said: "Looking at the full year, China has clearly had the most variability (and growth) across the top countries/regions, originating approximately 16 percent of observed attack traffic during the first half of 2012, doubling into the third quarter, and growing further in the fourth quarter. Russia also saw significant variability throughout the year, though in the opposite direction, declining from originating 7.2 percent of observed attacks in the first quarter to just 4.3 percent in the fourth quarter."

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From the Editor

ByDavid Rowan

Verizon's report states that the largest single driver of attacks from China was for data theft, constituting at least one-fifth of all attacks recorded. Romania was the second-largest originator of hacking attacks, representing 28 percent, and the US was in third with 18 percent.

The report is compiled with the help of 19 different cybersecurity and law enforcement agencies around the world (including Europol and the United States Secret Service), detailing more than 47,000 "security incidents" across 2012. However, the vast majority of these were either not malicious (resulting as a result of someone losing a company laptop, for instance), or not enough information was available to analyse. The report breaks down the sources and targets of 621 attacks in total.

The report said: "It's fascinatingly apparent that motive correlates very highly with country of origin. The majority of financially motivated incidents involved actors in either the US or Eastern European countries (e.g., Romania, Bulgaria, and the Russian Federation). 96 percent of espionage cases were attributed to threat actors in China and the remaining four percent were unknown." "This may mean that other threat groups perform their activities with greater stealth and subterfuge, but it could also mean that China is, in fact, the most active source of national and industrial espionage in the world today," it added.

In February, Wired.co.uk reported that a group affiliated with the Chinese army has been linked with a series of large cyber attacks on foreign government and business targets. A report from Mandiant found that 141 cyber attacks since 2006 could be attributed to the People's Liberation Army's military Unit 61398, based in the Pudong district of Shanghai.

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However, several securiy experts have warned that Chinese hacking attempts could be being overplayed by an industry seeking further government funding, and by national governments searching for justification for ramping up cyber security measures at the cost of online freedoms.

The Cyber Intelligence and Security Act (CISPA), which was passed by the House of Representatives in the US last week, is partly motivated by these fears. American intelligence and law enforcement agencies could access personal information without a warrant if it becomes law, and there is currently a protest movement across the web, similar to the successful blackouts seen directed at the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) last year that saw sites like Wikipedia "go black" for day.